While the pandemic gripped the globe five years ago this month, its aftereffects are still holding on, especially when it comes to students and lost education.
After students were sent home to complete the school year, and several semesters after, through distance learning, many feared that they might lose a step in their education.
Unfortunately, they still haven’t caught up, according to University of Michigan School of Education Dean Dr. Elizabeth Birr Moje, who recently spoke with WWJ News Radio about the issue.
Moje shared that digital learning, or hybrid models, are still in practice today, with educators and schools having worked out the kinks after starting “really rocky” during the pandemic. She says that while the option to learn remotely is beneficial for some students and families, it’s not for everyone and can cause problems that are difficult to overcome.
“We saw during the pandemic that children who hadn’t yet learned to read were really struggling because, of course, they couldn’t follow written directions,” Moje said. “And so the teacher was having to try to really engage in a lot of oral directions, [which] was difficult to facilitate in that hybrid space.”
Having the right tools can play a huge role in whether distance learners succeed or not, an issue that Moje says many faced during the pandemic and has even resulted in legal battles.
“I was part of a legal case actually where children in California just didn’t have the technology tools that they needed, and there were multiple children in a family trying to learn from the same parent’s iPhone, in three different grade levels, so that kind of situation just doesn’t allow for deep or you know rigorous learning,” she said.
Another contributing factor in successful distance learning is having what Moje calls “appropriate space” to learn.
“To be able to engage in online learning and what we saw in a lot of homes was that you know children were all in the same room, so there was a second grader and a sixth grader and a parent trying to work, and sometimes even that parent was a teacher trying to teach with their classroom of students while their children were learning all in the same space,” she said.
“As a result, in a lot of places, we saw classrooms where no child had a camera on, so the teacher couldn’t see the learner because there were other things going on in the home that just either weren’t appropriate to be on a camera or the child felt uncomfortable with or would have been a distraction.”
Moje also discussed the drop in learning levels that came from the pandemic, saying “a number of children did not have adequate tools, they didn’t have the right spaces in which to learn, and teachers frankly were juggling” too much at once.
As a result, students have seen their levels of learning, compared to their predecessors, fall.
“We’ve seen test scores drop pretty dramatically. Math scores are coming back up. Reading scores are continuing — at least in the state of Michigan — to decline. And that’s true in other states as well,” Moje said.
With technology issues, difficulties adapting to hybrid learning, and other failures also playing a factor, Moje says that there are some positives to be taken from these failures.
“In some cases, some children were… in virtual school for almost two years. And the kind of encouraging thing that this tells us is children actually do learn things in school,” Moje said.
Still, the issue needs to be addressed and Moje says it will take “alot of love and support and resources” into learning throughout the next several years.
“The biggest takeaway, we need more resources. We need literacy coaches. We need literacy specialists in classrooms helping the classroom teacher help children regain their skills,” she said.